The Gong Chamber that owner Jim Pettit installed in the Memphis Drum Shop is thought to be the only space of its kind in the world.

Playing some of his shop's large collection of gongs, Memphis Drum Shop owner Jim Pettit performs a "sonic massage" for Tom Lonardo. The vibrations of gongs have been prized for thousands of years for their purported healing powers.

Listening to the gongs at the Memphis Gong Chamber at Memphis Drum Shop may be an experience difficult to duplicate anywhere in the world.

It is a sound- and thermostatically controlled room armored in polished and gleaming metal gongs of all sizes and surfaces. When shop owner Jim Pettit strokes them with padded mallets, the response is like something primordial, the rush and roar between chaos and creation.

It sweeps over Memphis drummer Tom Lonardo, a recent visitor, like a tsunami, shaking him to the core, washing from him every vestige of tension and stress, he said.

Pettit, who opened the chamber about two years ago at his shop in Cooper-Young, has equipped it and an adjoining room with nearly 50 gongs. In April, he added three monsters: two 60-inch gongs and the big daddy at 84 inches.

Ed Clift, percussion specialty liaison for Paiste, a world-class gong maker, believes Pettit's 84-inch gong, made by Paiste, is the world's largest symphonic gong, meaning that it is capable of a symphony of sound. The largest-size gong Paiste offers is 80 inches, he said. Pettit's gong just turned out a little bigger.

"People in Memphis don't realize how rare it is to have a place like that," said Clift, who has traveled the world for Paiste, headquartered in Switzerland. "A few collectors have a collection that big. But Jim has created a space that optimizes the experience from an acoustic and sonic point of view," said Clift. "It's fair to say the Gong Chamber is the only space of its kind in the world."

Paiste gongs are handmade in Germany of nickel silver. A big one can take a skilled artisan two months to craft. One false blow can ruin it.

The Gong Chamber is kept locked, and sales are by appointment only. Pettit's customers have included Carl Palmer of Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Anne-Marie Perry, sister of Aerosmith's Joe Perry.

Pettit has decorative gongs for as little as $100. One could expect to pay $500 to $2,800 for one with a nice sound. The larger gongs go for $20,000 and up.

The gongs tap into a lively interest in what is called sound healing, a practice that dates back to ancient Eastern civilizations' reverence for gongs, which were used as aids to meditation, portals to a spirit world, and instruments of ceremony, ritual and prayer.

Pettit, surprised by the interest the gongs have aroused all over the country, held a "sonic massage" on Sept. 8 at the chamber, and plans others because people asked for them, he said. Participants who paid $60 each for the hourlong "massage" included Lonardo and others from Georgia, Alabama and North Carolina.

What they experienced, repeated on Lonardo's visit this week to the chamber, was like the whisper of the womb, the thunder of a Boeing, the haunting wail of a leviathan from the abyss. Other times it sounded like a terrific soundtrack for a remake of "2001: A Space Odyssey."

You can get an idea of what it sounds like through links to videos at memphisgongchamber.com. Pettit advises using earphones.

Lonardo, who plays with Di Anne Price, Susan Marshall and others, said he was turned on to gongs in California by a friend who had experienced them at Buddhist temples in Asia.

"As a drummer, I was trying to figure out what shamans do in other cultures and how healing is done through percussion instruments," he said. "I didn't understand how it worked until I took a gong massage."

He said the experience is much like a state of meditation. When he left the recent session here, he was rubber, he said.

Sound healing is considered alternative or holistic in this country, with advocates an assortment of acupuncturists, chiropractors, musicians, engineers and others. They often explain how it works through the phenomenon of "entrainment," observed when grandfather clocks with pendulums all swinging at different rates, within a few hours, all swing at the same rate. In a similar fashion, the powerful vibrations of a gong are said to bring the varied, weaker vibrations in all parts of our bodies to "sing" in tune.

Sound healing does not have as much solid research behind it as music therapy, said Barbara J. Crowe, director of music therapy at Arizona State University. But when you consider its use goes back to ancient Egypt, Babylonia and India, "It's about 8,000 years of anecdotal support," she said.

And there is some scientific evidence from the Monroe Institute, a nonprofit research and educational facility in Virginia that has developed and patented a binaural-beat technology that it says can bring about more equal functioning of the two halves of the brain.

Researchers there "talk of sound vibrations at certain frequencies bringing the two hemispheres of the brain into coherence," said Crowe, "so they are working at the same wavelength. The gongs work the same way so you feel relaxed and better."